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Rick Santelli: Tea Party Time

Yesterday Rick Santelli, who reports from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade the for CNBC, unleashed a rant against Obama’s newly announced housing bailout plan, intended to help some homeowners refinance mortgages and avoid foreclosure. The clip was quickly linked to and embedded in Web sites everywhere, and provoked intense reaction that pretty much broke along partisan lines.

I’ve had a case of deja vu today.
I’m noticing the tone. I’m seeing the enthusiasm. And I’m digging out from the sheer volume of e-mails I’ve been getting today about that CNBC dude. The reaction to Rick Santelli’s Chicago-trading-floor incident this morning echoes the emotional reaction my inbox had to Sarah Palin’s convention speech this summer.

I make no endorsements. It’s just an observation.

I think people are hungry for someone who is fed up with the way things are and who seem to believe in something enough to know there in an alternative worth fighting for. Some of the voices may be far from perfect, but Americans are looking for signs of the life of an alternative. And so if a representative pops up — someone who appears to have roots and energy, folks will cheer them on in the hopes there’s a candidate here. Maybe not a presidential candidate, but a leader of some sort. Someone who can offer a vision of something other than a culture of bailout.

Team Obama is rewarding bad behavior. It is enlarging moral hazard. It is expanding its welfarist approach to economic policy. And with a huge expansion of government-owned zombie lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Team Obama is taking a giant step toward nationalizing the mortgage market. . .

Reporting from the Chicago commodity pits, my CNBC colleague Rick Santelli unleashed a torrent of criticism against this scheme. Santelli said: “Government is promoting bad behavior. . . . Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It’s a moral hazard.”

All this took place on the air, to the cheers of traders. Santelli called for a new tea party in support of capitalism. He’s right.

After watching the [Santelli clip], I first had to check my calendar. Somehow I felt I traveled back in time to the early 1970s to witness first hand Richard Nixon’s “northern strategy,” his pursuit of white ethnic voters who were so deeply disaffected over Great Society programs ranging from desegregation (remember the Boston busing madness?) to affirmative action among others that they would desert the Democratic Party becoming “Nixon’s silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats”. . . .

Rick Santelli is heir to this legacy laced with racist overtones. Note the promo before the rant in the video link at CNBC. CNBC has an upcoming special entitled The Rise of America’s New Black Overclass. Fear mongering, it’s worked before so let’s try it again. It’s back to the 1970s for the GOP and their rabid white ethnics.

I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics — Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others — and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. Nor could any of them ever get my name right. “My name is Charles, not Chuckie” was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.

The most amusing thing to me about this Rick Santelli faux populist broker revolt is not his invocation of the Nixonian silent majority, but the utter lack of perspective it displays. Yes, there is a simmering discontent and anger out there, and clearly the Republicans are going to try to tap into it, but the problem for Santelli and his crowd is that the anger is not directed at the people who are losing their homes, but at the people Santelli spends every day rubbing shoulders with at the trendy Chicago restaurants the brokers go to these days.

The audacity of Santelli’s “revolt” is that a mere 75 billion is being spent to help struggling families repackage loans- a mere pittance in the terms of the gargantuan amount of money being thrown at the banks, the Wall Street wizards, and the rest of the rocket scientists who are the root of this problem. . .

As a rebuttal of sorts to Santelli, David Sirota at Open Left offered a clip of a Fox News interview with Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Mich., from earlier in the week, in which “Bernero demands to know how anyone can be calling for wage/benefit cuts for workers at a time the government is taking workers’ tax money and handing it to the very speculators that Santelli is whooping it up with.”

Along the lines of Cole, Sirota frames the debate as one between market populism (Santelli) and grassroots populism (Bernero):

After watching these two clips, the question is the same question that’s always been at the heart of economic politics: Which side are you on? And the answer, if you look at the hard data, is that most Americans are Grassroots Populists: those who think Wall Street and the government are colluding to rip off taxpayers, and who think the crumbs of aid for so-called “losers” that Santelli is ragging on is way too small — not way too much.

The gap, of course, is in the portrayal. If you watch television or read op-ed pages, the Market Populists get most of the attention. Indeed, Market Populism is portrayed as the “centrist” mainstream sentiment in the United States. . . . Meanwhile, Grassroots Populism — ie. seething populist anger at Corporate America — is depicted as the ideology only of a tiny fringe. It’s as if the media is a funhouse mirror on society — a bizzaro world where up is down, black is white, and free market fundamentalism is portrayed as a mass-based movement. . . .

This divide between the Market Populism people are fed through the media and people’s own Grassroots Populism is a major catalyst that has turned the last two elections into backlash moments. And as bailouts and handouts now become daily news, and the Market Populists get ever more outrageous, that backlash is intensifying. Channeling it into something positive is the challenge of our time.

Where was the outrage when we dropped 800 billion to bail out the banks? Why aren’t these people marching in the streets due to the recently announced plan to give a trillion or so so hedge funds? I think I know the answer.

The rant should be against Wall Street and the traders who are responsible for the economic problems. I didn’t see Santelli yesterday, but I saw him on NBC this morning and it is just as I suspected: he is an airhead wanting attention. He needs to sit down and shut up.

I agree with him – I’m a renter, I didn’t overextend, and the bubble priced me out of buying in Los Angeles. So I put my money in the stock market. Well, the bubble burst, and not only did those idiots prevent me from buying by driving up the prices, but they destroyed my stocks as well. Still, I paid my bills and lived within my means. And now they want to reward those guys at my expense? What a joke. I voted for Obama, and I’m for him, but people who lose their homes can rent just like I am. Consider the money lost in the transaction like the money I lost in the market. I don’t see what the problem with renting is.

Santelli’s rant is disgusting and disingenuous. If Wall Street wants to go to war with America I say bring it on. America is much bigger than Wall Street, and it’s up to the fight. Go ahead, floor traders. Knock yourselves out.

Greedy, small, narrow people got us into this financial mess and now the same greedy, small, narrow people are going to snipe and hack at those who were just overwhelmingly elected to fix 8 years of incompetence in government, banking, fiancne and manufacturing. Tea Party, Shmee Party. Palin-Santelli? Right…..

As long as the government just hands out the trillions to prop up the very system Mr. Santelli makes a living on, he doesn’t have an opinion. But now that we throw a mere fraction of that amount to help to keep families off the street, now Mr. Santelli has an opinion. What a hypocrite. I resent the fact that my tax dollars are helping to keep this tool on the air and I wait for the day that he is filling out a form for unemployment insurance.

Is it any wonder that Bloomberg media exists? CNBC is the uber Fox wannabee ‘business’ media outlet, except it is not about business, it is about traders and speculators with a Jon Benoy Ramsey tilt. Screeching is the norm and Hoover was too damn liberal. Darwin was right, the righteous make a profit and the rest be sccoted off to the poor house.

I trade , I need news, and need insights on the markets. You want to know who was throwing gasoline on the Bear Sterns,Lehmans , AIG fires? look to CNBC. I would love to get a legal deposition from all the CNBC types about their short positions. Remember, if someone lost money , someone made it.

Insider trading is only the tip of the push this way push that way insiders media club. Screaming ‘fire’ or fire sale at the opportune time takes a raw nerves market and sets it off. Add a little pandering and you have the CNBC message

Here’s a multiple choice question: What do you think is the annual income of the average television talking head?
a) less than $50,000
b) $50,000 to $100,000
c) $100,000 to $250,000
d) above $250,000
It is no surprise to me that there is a disconnect between media talking heads and main street America.

Sides? It tooks years to get in this economic mess (which btw a lot of people saw coming but who sat silently on the side, quiet) and now armchair quarterbacks are quick to criticize because the president hasn’t fixed the problem in thirty days. Where were these monday morning quarterback brilliants elitists when this mess evolved…did they suddenly wake up after Bush left office? This mess isn’t going to be fixed for YEARS…my 403b evaporated…not due to the administration present but due to the lack of diligence and the greed of the past three administrations….you have every right to voice your complaints but how about showing people your finances…lets see if you were able to sustain your wealth…or if you lost money. I want to know if “your blues are my blues” and you are not just doing politcal posturing.

Mr. Lemos, the tactic of demonizing those you disagree with is losing its power. You come across as more bigoted and intolerant than the people you condemn. And I and many others I know totally reject, now and forever, any accusations of racism. You do not know us. How dare you judge us.

Do you read the comments in the NY Times? Yesterday, hundreds of NY Times readers weighed in and were almost universally outraged at the unfairness of this plan.
How can you say that the intense reaction “pretty much broke along partisan lines.” THAT IS FALSE.

Many progressives, liberals and Obama-supporters are outraged. This is so patently irresponsible and unfair that people of all political stripes are furious.

Please don’t ignore reality! People are gearing up for revolution. THIS IS NO WAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!

Fed up? Angry? The government is taking my hard-hard-earned money and giving it to the foreclosed, failed businesses, the ILLEGAL immigrants, elementary-school-sex-education-replete-with-condoms…. Yes, I’d say I’m angry. If Rick Santelli’s Chicago Tea Party happens, I hope the first thing we dump is Congress.

Santelli’s rant was remarkably disingenuous, for the reasons Cole and Sirota outlined. Fun house mirror indeed, why would an “average American” feel the need to get any more riled up about $75 b. for homeowners than hundreds upon hundreds of billions for the financial services marketeers?

I wonder how many months’ worth of mortgage payments on “Joe Six-Pack’s” 150K house could be made for the cost of Santelli’s suit and the wages paid to the stylist who blow-dried and pancaked him for that segment.

Yeah, Rick! And then there is that $5 trillion of federal debt the last Administration ran up in less than eight years! And that war that our kids and grand kids will be paying for over the lives! And don’t forget about the Karl Rove socialistic ‘prescription medicine’ benefit that simply panders to whiny, spoiled seniors! And speaking of whiny folks (they’re called liberals, right?) what about those poor multimillionaires whose taxes might go up soon — reducing them to having only two or three houses and having to drive their Rolls Royce autos themselves! Man, right on, Rick!

So far, the proof is in the pudding. Global markets are not encouraged by the socialist slant of government covering people’s mortgages – and borrowing in order to do it. Orwellian, isn’t it?
I think I’d like to do my own rant.

If Santelli is such a free market purist, perhaps he should be calling for the end of the mortgage interest deduction, an enormous subsidy given to people across the income spectrum (including him I am sure!) Has anyone thought of the impact of foreclosures on families and kids and the potential cost to our society in terms of both social service dollars and the potential opportunity cost to us of not developing our human capital to its fullest potential?

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The Thread is an in-depth look at how the major news events and controversies of the day are being viewed and debated across the online spectrum. Compiled by Peter Catapano, an editor in The Times’s Opinion section, the Thread is published every Saturday in response to breaking news.